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Definition of Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a... read full definition
Part One
Explanation and Analysis—Ratched's True Form:
In Part One, Bromden introduces Nurse Ratched not as a human, but as a machine "big as a tractor" who can disguise herself as a human. When the other patients come out of their dorms, there is an interesting interplay between dramatic irony and Bromden's status as an unreliable narrator:
[S]he has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of her hideous real self. By the time the patients get their eyes rubbed to where they can halfway see what the racket’s about, all they see is the head nurse, smiling and calm and cold as usual [...]
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Part Three
Explanation and Analysis—McMurphy's Hands:
In Part Three, when the men go on McMurphy's fishing expedition, they have an altercation with some men at a gas station. McMurphy uses dramatic irony and an idiom to intimidate the gas station attendant:
Unlock with LitCharts A+He put his hands up in the guy’s face, real close, turning them over slowly, palm and knuckle. “You ever see a man get his poor old meat-hooks so pitiful chewed up from just throwin’ the bull? Did you, Hank?”
He held those hands in the guy’s face a long time, waiting to see if the guy had anything else to say. The guy looked at the hands, and at me, and back at the hands.
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Explanation and Analysis—Keep Acting:
In Part Three, Bromden wants to sign up for McMurphy's fishing expedition but is afraid to do so because of the dramatic irony he has maintained so long around his hearing. He is amused by the situational irony:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[I]t’d show I’d been hearing everything else that’d been said in confidence around me for the past ten years. And if the Big Nurse found out about that, that I’d heard all the scheming and treachery that had gone on when she didn’t think anybody was listening, she’d hunt me down with an electric saw, fix me where she knew I was deaf and dumb. Bad as I wanted to go, it still made me smile a little to think about it: I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all.
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